This commentary is by Samn Stockwell. She is a member of the Barre City Council and of the Barre Housing Coalition.
“How salt is the taste of another man’s bread, how bitter the climb of another man’s stairs”
— Dante
For an increasing number of Americans, it’s the Great Depression. Sheltering in tents and lining up for free meals, they are living in an updated version of Hoovervilles. President Hoover did not create the tent cities that sprang up as people lost their jobs and their homes. The residents named them in derision of the president who stood by and did nothing as people lost everything.
The major difference between the Great Depression and now is that many of the unhoused work. An estimated 40-60% work at fast food restaurants and corner stores, gas stations and hospitals. They are our “essential workers.” They work and work for a wage that will never pay them enough to rent an apartment, maintain a car, and feed their family. According to data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the wage needed to afford a two-bedroom apartment in Vermont is $29.42 per hour, assuming a predictable 40-hour work week.
To not pay a livable wage is to deprive workers of their freedom and their hope. Maybe it was better to be an indentured servant. Am I exaggerating? Yes, but the conditions of indentured servants ended after four to six years and the compensation often included land, clothes, and food.
I know people who have worked for decades at our stores and restaurants and cannot afford food and rent. (Indenture was, not surprisingly, a far worse system for women and they were less likely to be released and compensated.)
Even if we paid people fairly, we have not developed enough housing, which ensures we will have waves of unhoused people and the cost of housing will remain high. In response, states have created temporary housing in motels and unused buildings. Tiny house villages and housing pods have been developed across the country as temporary housing until there is permanent housing to transition to.
There is nothing to transition to. Children of Vermont workers are growing up in encampments and being shuffled between motel rooms while on waiting lists for housing that are years long. If we are not creating housing, we cannot solve the problem. The only thing we can do is warehouse people. We can have people fill out more applications for more waiting lists, but applications do not build housing.
Temporary housing is not a Hooverville. Hoovervilles were created by the people who lived there. A Hooverville has a measure of independence: you can build what is possible for you to build and improvise as possible. I don’t mean to romanticize the reality of living in a tent in the woods. It’s an extremely difficult life, but it has more autonomy than living in a motel room.
Temporary housing is like a poor farm without a town-directed bidding process. The poor farms housed people without an income. The town accepted the lowest bidder to feed and shelter the town’s dependents. The poor farm overseer could be kind or cruel, but at a poor farm the residents had no control. Some would escape by finding work outside, but the old and disabled would die there.
Temporary housing is allotted by a system of shifting priorities. Families with young children and people with disabilities are as likely to lose housing as anyone else. Individual effort or the skill of the social worker will not help someone stay in temporary housing or find permanent housing.
People in temporary housing are nobody’s neighbors. They remain invisible and unknown, their individuality lost, except for the three minutes they might be seen on a news show as they lose their motel room/tent/RV. Temporary housing is an experience of segregation. Segregation can arise out of benevolence but invariably they become “those people”. The more segregated they are, the more likely they will be treated in all the ways we treated every other segregated group. In part, poor farms were located on the outskirts of town to keep the poor out of view.
I read editorials about the mental health challenges some unhoused people face. This is undeniable, but so is the reverse: many an unhoused person would find their mental health vastly improved by stable housing and reliable employment.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Samn Stockwell: Hoovervilles and Vermont’s modern housing crisis.